The Strange Case of Shelby Steele

or "A Boring Man: Why We Are Tired of Shelby Steel and Why He Can't Change."

This interview from the Hoover Institution is very long, but worthwhile. Here the prominent black conservative intellectual twists himself into a variety of ever less attractive knots to avoid internalizing the obvious.

You remember that Steele -- author of many books including the very important "A Dream Deferred" (1999) -- took a very strong and highly visible anti-Obama position throughout the campaign. Amazingly for a previously thoughtful and provocative thinker, his argument in this case took the form of a flimsy polemic that labeled Obama a Louis Armstrong/Bill Cosby like accomodator (or "bargainer" in Steele's vocabulary), who, to put it crudely, would Uncle Tom his way to certain defeat in November.

Despite the abundant evidence undermining his premise -- not the least of which is every single exit poll -- here he is, a couple of week after the election, holding fast to his belief that Obama is nothing more (literally nothing more) that a racial cipher elected exclusively on the basis of race as a mighty assuagement of white guilt.

Among the many weird ideas supporting a manifestly out-of-date thesis are these:

1. We still don't know who Obama is. We don't know the content of his character. (Cue Margot Channing: There's that word again! I don't even know what it means)

2. We only voted for him because he's black. There was no other compelling reason to vote for Barack Obama other than his race (he says this often; I guess he believes it. Is the converse then true -- John McCain lost solely because he is white?).

3. He attended a black nationalist church that his mother couldn't attended and never explained how he reconciled that. (Note to Shelby: the Philadelphia speech on race is easily found on YouTube. You might not agree, but its an explanation.)

4. He grew up in an era of identity politics, which necessitated his needed to reinforce his identity as an African-American in his early days in Chicago politics, only to later abandon that identity to assume another identity as a "black bargainer" so that he could run a campaign free of racial identity. I am not making this up.

And it goes on.

It is sad to see a previously intellectually honest conservative so out of touch with contemporary cultural dynamics that his is blinded to anything that does not support (at least inversely) his ideology.

Did Barack gain traction and capture attention because of his race? Of course. Did he win because of his race in a vast spasm of electoral reverse discrimination? Of course not. I think its safe to say that youth, progressive positions in sync with times, latent anti-dynasticism among Democratic voters, early opposition to the Iraq way (which was very important at the beginning of the primary season -- remember?), solid and clearly explained foreign policy positions, the utter collapse of the opposition party, an economic crisis and The Queen of Alaska (as Gore Vidal calls You Know Who) played a part too.

But Steele can only see the world through the identity-driven lens of his own creation; he assumes the exact position of intransigent racial stasis so articulately decried in his early work.